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I love Beloved

by
Jenny.Zeng
Toni Morrison is a popular woman writer in America. Beloved is a milestone in the history of African-American literature. Black women and their maternal love are her major concerns and the most important themes in Morrison’s fictions. The story focuses on Sethe’s escaping, killing her daughter, and reaction after the return of Beloved. The themes of distortion of maternity across time run through almost all her novels. In Beloved, Morrison tries to cure African-American people’s inner hurt with the black maternal love. Through the analysis of the painful experience of black women before and after the abolition of slavery, this paper attempts to reveal the tragic experience of black women under double oppressions. Beloved highlights the effect of slavery on the ex-slaves, especially giving the blacks mental disturbance. Morrison selected the woman who had suffered form racial and sexism oppression as their national hero, bearing the task of forming the image, which is not against national history. This novel tries to give a feminist study of the heroines in Beloved. This essay describes racial how oppressions and sexual discrimination hurt women’s emotions, stripped of their rights and twisted their characters.
In Beloved, Toni Morrison exposes the woeful life of the blacks. They undergo the oppressions in American history. Morrison pays special attention to the race, gender and class. The black people are inferior to the white people; the blacks want to achieve the racial equality. There are three generations of black women in the novel. Baby Suggs just accepts all the sorrowful experiences. She doesn’t want to fight. Sethe doesn’t want to be oppressed by slaveholders. She is brave enough to escape. However, the black skin causes her tragic life. Denver attains her freedom and finds her self-identity. Morrison thinks self-consciousness is very important for black women to find themselves. “Without such an active self-consciousness, there can be no self-respect, self- reliance and independence for them.”24 The women in Beloved have different attitudes towards oppressions. The description of the three generations reflect that the necessity of unity. Morrison believes “Black women’s self-consciousness is crucial to their emancipation. Without such an active self-consciousness, there can be no self-respect, self-reliance and independence for them.” They are treated as animals. So they should get together to remove the racial discrimination. Only in this way can they get rid of the men-dominated and the white-dominated society. Nowadays, the black women are accepted by the American society. They have rights to express their opinions. They have many opportunities to show their values. They become more and more confident. Some of them have made great contributions to humans. But they still have a long way to go. They will gradually make themselves accepted.